Pierrepoint by Steven Fielding

Author:Steven Fielding
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781843585633
Publisher: John Blake Publishing
Published: 2011-05-04T16:00:00+00:00

Tom Pierrepoint officiated at every execution carried out in 1938, the first time in over 20 years that one hangman had carried out all capital sentences in one calendar year. He travelled as far afield as Norwich, Durham, Liverpool, Manchester and Wandsworth. (Nephew Albert assisted on visits to the last three prisons.) It was a year that saw over a dozen reprieves including three women.

In March 1939, Albert received a letter asking him to assist at an execution at Wandsworth Prison. The executioner was not his uncle, who had accepted an engagement scheduled to take place at Pentonville on the same day; instead it was to be the debut execution of Tom Phillips. Phillips had been an assistant dating back to the days when Ellis was the chief executioner and had worked as Tom’s assistant on over a score of occasions.

On 2 January 1939, the body of 17-year-old Peggy Irene Pentecost was found in a Lambeth hotel room. She had been strangled and a bed quilt had been forced into her mouth. She had checked into the hotel on New Year’s Eve with a man who had signed the register Mr and Mrs Armstrong of Seaford.

Armstrong was traced and found to be a parlour-man of Seaford, with a number of previous convictions, including attempted murder. He admitted that he had become engaged to Peggy shortly after Christmas, and at his two-day trial before Mr Justice Humphries at the Old Bailey, in March, it was alleged he had killed her after he had discovered she was also seeing another man. Armstrong’s execution was the first of five that took place at Wandsworth that year. Four days later Tom Pierrepoint, with Phillips as his assistant, carried out the execution of William Butler, who had stabbed a shopkeeper to death during a robbery. The final three executions all took place in October, a month after war had broken out in Europe. In two days at the end of October Tom hanged two soldiers from the North Staffordshire Regiment on consecutive days for the rape and murder of a hotel worker close to where they were stationed in Surrey.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.